WGET(1) GNU Wget WGET(1)
NAME
Wget - The non-interactive network downloader.
SYNOPSIS
wget [option]... [URL]...
DESCRIPTION
GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and
FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.
Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on. This
allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the work. By contrast,
most of the Web browsers require constant user's presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a
lot of data.
Wget can follow links in HTML, XHTML, and CSS pages, to create local versions of remote web sites, fully
recreating the directory structure of the original site. This is sometimes referred to as "recursive
downloading." While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). Wget can be
instructed to convert the links in downloaded files to point at the local files, for offline viewing.
Wget has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network connections; if a download fails due to a
network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole file has been retrieved. If the server supports
regetting, it will instruct the server to continue the download from where it left off.
OPTIONS
Option Syntax
Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line arguments, every option has a long form along with the
short one. Long options are more convenient to remember, but take time to type. You may freely mix different
option styles, or specify options after the command-line arguments. Thus you may write:
wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ -o log
The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may be omitted. Instead of -o log you can
write -olog.
You may put several options that do not require arguments together, like:
wget -drc <URL>
This is completely equivalent to:
wget -d -r -c <URL>
Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may terminate them with --. So the following will
try to download URL -x, reporting failure to log:
wget -o log -- -x
The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention that specifying an empty list clears
its value. This can be useful to clear the .wgetrc settings. For instance, if your .wgetrc sets
"exclude_directories" to /cgi-bin, the following example will first reset it, and then set it to exclude
/~nobody and /~somebody. You can also clear the lists in .wgetrc.
wget -X " -X /~nobody,/~somebody
Most options that do not accept arguments are boolean options, so named because their state can be captured
using --no-follow-ftp is the only way to restore the factory default from the command line.
Basic Startup Options
-V
--version
Display the version of Wget.
-h
--help
Print a help message describing all of Wget's command-line options.
-b
--background
Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the -o, output is
redirected to wget-log.
-e command
--execute command
Execute command as if it were a part of .wgetrc. A command thus invoked will be executed after the
commands in .wgetrc, thus taking precedence over them. If you need to specify more than one wgetrc
command, use multiple instances of -e.
Logging and Input File Options
-o logfile
--output-file=logfile
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard error.
-a logfile
--append-output=logfile
Append to logfile. This is the same as -o, only it appends to logfile instead of overwriting the old log
file. If logfile does not exist, a new file is created.
-d
--debug
Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to the developers of Wget if it does not work
properly. Your system administrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug support, in which case
-d will not work. Please note that compiling with debug support is always safe---Wget compiled with the
debug support will not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
-q
--quiet
Turn off Wget's output.
-v
--verbose
Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.
-nv
--no-verbose
Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use -q for that), which means that error messages and
basic information still get printed.
--report-speed=type
Output bandwidth as type. The only accepted value is bits.
by specifying --base=url on the command line.
If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically treated as html if the Content-Type
matches text/html. Furthermore, the file's location will be implicitly used as base href if none was
specified.
-F
--force-html
When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML file. This enables you to retrieve
relative links from existing HTML files on your local disk, by adding "<base href="url">" to HTML, or
using the --base command-line option.
-B URL
--base=URL
Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when reading links from an HTML file
specified via the -i/--input-file option (together with --force-html, or when the input file was fetched
remotely from a server describing it as HTML). This is equivalent to the presence of a "BASE" tag in the
HTML input file, with URL as the value for the "href" attribute.
For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for URL, and Wget reads ../baz/b.html from the input
file, it would be resolved to http://foo/baz/b.html.
--config=FILE
Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use.
Download Options
--bind-address=ADDRESS
When making client TCP/IP connections, bind to ADDRESS on the local machine. ADDRESS may be specified as
a hostname or IP address. This option can be useful if your machine is bound to multiple IPs.
-t number
--tries=number
Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or inf for infinite retrying. The default is to retry 20
times, with the exception of fatal errors like "connection refused" or "not found" (404), which are not
retried.
-O file
--output-document=file
The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be concatenated together and
written to file. If - is used as file, documents will be printed to standard output, disabling link
conversion. (Use ./- to print to a file literally named -.)
Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name file instead of the one in the URL;" rather, it is
analogous to shell redirection: wget -O file http://foo is intended to work like wget -O - http://foo >
file; file will be truncated immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there.
For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in combination with -O: since file is always
newly created, it will always have a very new timestamp. A warning will be issued if this combination is
used.
Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect: Wget won't just download the first file to
file and then download the rest to their normal names: all downloaded content will be placed in file. This
was disabled in version 1.11, but has been reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases
where this behavior can actually have some use.
in the original copy of file being preserved and the second copy being named file.1. If that file is
downloaded yet again, the third copy will be named file.2, and so on. (This is also the behavior with
-nd, even if -r or -p are in effect.) When -nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and Wget will
refuse to download newer copies of file. Therefore, ""no-clobber"" is actually a misnomer in this
mode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the numeric suffixes were already preventing clobbering),
but rather the multiple version saving that's prevented.
When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N, -nd, or -nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new
copy simply overwriting the old. Adding -nc will prevent this behavior, instead causing the original
version to be preserved and any newer copies on the server to be ignored.
When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or -p, the decision as to whether or not to download a newer
copy of a file depends on the local and remote timestamp and size of the file. -nc may not be specified
at the same time as -N.
Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html or .htm will be loaded from the local disk
and parsed as if they had been retrieved from the Web.
--backups=backups
Before (over)writing a file, back up an existing file by adding a .1 suffix (_1 on VMS) to the file name.
Such backup files are rotated to .2, .3, and so on, up to backups (and lost beyond that).
-c
--continue
Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is useful when you want to finish up a download
started by a previous instance of Wget, or by another program. For instance:
wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z
If there is a file named ls-lR.Z in the current directory, Wget will assume that it is the first portion
of the remote file, and will ask the server to continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the length
of the local file.
Note that you don't need to specify this option if you just want the current invocation of Wget to retry
downloading a file should the connection be lost midway through. This is the default behavior. -c only
affects resumption of downloads started prior to this invocation of Wget, and whose local files are still
sitting around.
Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote file to ls-lR.Z.1, leaving the truncated
ls-lR.Z file alone.
Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a non-empty file, and it turns out that the server does not
support continued downloading, Wget will refuse to start the download from scratch, which would
effectively ruin existing contents. If you really want the download to start from scratch, remove the
file.
Also beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a file which is of equal size as the one on the server,
Wget will refuse to download the file and print an explanatory message. The same happens when the file is
smaller on the server than locally (presumably because it was changed on the server since your last
download attempt)---because "continuing" is not meaningful, no download occurs.
On the other side of the coin, while using -c, any file that's bigger on the server than locally will be
considered an incomplete download and only "(length(remote) - length(local))" bytes will be downloaded and
tacked onto the end of the local file. This behavior can be desirable in certain cases---for instance,
Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with HTTP servers that support the "Range" header.
--progress=type
Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use. Legal indicators are "dot" and "bar".
The "bar" indicator is used by default. It draws an ASCII progress bar graphics (a.k.a "thermometer"
display) indicating the status of retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, the "dot" bar will be used by
default.
Use --progress=dot to switch to the "dot" display. It traces the retrieval by printing dots on the
screen, each dot representing a fixed amount of downloaded data.
When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set the style by specifying the type as dot:style.
Different styles assign different meaning to one dot. With the "default" style each dot represents 1K,
there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The "binary" style has a more "computer"-like
orientation---8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384K lines). The "mega"
style is suitable for downloading very large files---each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are eight
dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3M).
Note that you can set the default style using the "progress" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be
overridden from the command line. The exception is that, when the output is not a TTY, the "dot" progress
will be favored over "bar". To force the bar output, use --progress=bar:force.
-N
--timestamping
Turn on time-stamping.
--no-use-server-timestamps
Don't set the local file's timestamp by the one on the server.
By default, when a file is downloaded, it's timestamps are set to match those from the remote file. This
allows the use of --timestamping on subsequent invocations of wget. However, it is sometimes useful to
base the local file's timestamp on when it was actually downloaded; for that purpose, the
--no-use-server-timestamps option has been provided.
-S
--server-response
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.
--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web spider, which means that it will not download the
pages, just check that they are there. For example, you can use Wget to check your bookmarks:
wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the functionality of real web spiders.
-T seconds
--timeout=seconds
Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is equivalent to specifying --dns-timeout,
--connect-timeout, and --read-timeout, all at the same time.
When interacting with the network, Wget can check for timeout and abort the operation if it takes too
long. This prevents anomalies like hanging reads and infinite connects. The only timeout enabled by
--connect-timeout=seconds
Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP connections that take longer to establish will be
aborted. By default, there is no connect timeout, other than that implemented by system libraries.
--read-timeout=seconds
Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds. The "time" of this timeout refers to idle time: if,
at any point in the download, no data is received for more than the specified number of seconds, reading
fails and the download is restarted. This option does not directly affect the duration of the entire
download.
Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the connection sooner than this option requires. The
default read timeout is 900 seconds.
--limit-rate=amount
Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second. Amount may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the
k suffix, or megabytes with the m suffix. For example, --limit-rate=20k will limit the retrieval rate to
20KB/s. This is useful when, for whatever reason, you don't want Wget to consume the entire available
bandwidth.
This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction with power suffixes; for example,
--limit-rate=2.5k is a legal value.
Note that Wget implements the limiting by sleeping the appropriate amount of time after a network read
that took less time than specified by the rate. Eventually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow
down to approximately the specified rate. However, it may take some time for this balance to be achieved,
so don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't work well with very small files.
-w seconds
--wait=seconds
Wait the specified number of seconds between the retrievals. Use of this option is recommended, as it
lightens the server load by making the requests less frequent. Instead of in seconds, the time can be
specified in minutes using the "m" suffix, in hours using "h" suffix, or in days using "d" suffix.
Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the destination host is down, so that
Wget can wait long enough to reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before the retry. The
waiting interval specified by this function is influenced by "--random-wait", which see.
--waitretry=seconds
If you don't want Wget to wait between every retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads, you
can use this option. Wget will use linear backoff, waiting 1 second after the first failure on a given
file, then waiting 2 seconds after the second failure on that file, up to the maximum number of seconds
you specify.
By default, Wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.
--random-wait
Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as Wget by looking for
statistically significant similarities in the time between requests. This option causes the time between
requests to vary between 0.5 and 1.5 * wait seconds, where wait was specified using the --wait option, in
order to mask Wget's presence from such analysis.
A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development on a popular consumer platform provided code to
perform this analysis on the fly. Its author suggested blocking at the class C address level to ensure
automated retrieval programs were blocked despite changing DHCP-supplied addresses.
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you specify wget -Q10k
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz, all of the ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when
several URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is respected when retrieving either
recursively, or from an input file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will be
aborted when the quota is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.
--no-dns-cache
Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, Wget remembers the IP addresses it looked up from DNS so it
doesn't have to repeatedly contact the DNS server for the same (typically small) set of hosts it retrieves
from. This cache exists in memory only; a new Wget run will contact DNS again.
However, it has been reported that in some situations it is not desirable to cache host names, even for
the duration of a short-running application like Wget. With this option Wget issues a new DNS lookup
(more precisely, a new call to "gethostbyname" or "getaddrinfo") each time it makes a new connection.
Please note that this option will not affect caching that might be performed by the resolving library or
by an external caching layer, such as NSCD.
If you don't understand exactly what this option does, you probably won't need it.
--restrict-file-names=modes
Change which characters found in remote URLs must be escaped during generation of local filenames.
Characters that are restricted by this option are escaped, i.e. replaced with %HH, where HH is the
hexadecimal number that corresponds to the restricted character. This option may also be used to force all
alphabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.
By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part of file names on your operating
system, as well as control characters that are typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing
these defaults, perhaps because you are downloading to a non-native partition, or because you want to
disable escaping of the control characters, or you want to further restrict characters to only those in
the ASCII range of values.
The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The acceptable values are unix, windows, nocontrol,
ascii, lowercase, and uppercase. The values unix and windows are mutually exclusive (one will override the
other), as are lowercase and uppercase. Those last are special cases, as they do not change the set of
characters that would be escaped, but rather force local file paths to be converted either to lower- or
uppercase.
When "unix" is specified, Wget escapes the character / and the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and
128--159. This is the default on Unix-like operating systems.
When "windows" is given, Wget escapes the characters \, |, /, :, ?, ", *, <, >, and the control characters
in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. In addition to this, Wget in Windows mode uses + instead of : to
separate host and port in local file names, and uses @ instead of ? to separate the query portion of the
file name from the rest. Therefore, a URL that would be saved as www.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?input=blah
in Unix mode would be saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah in Windows mode. This mode is the
default on Windows.
If you specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control characters is also switched off. This option
may make sense when you are downloading URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can
save and display filenames in UTF-8 (some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the
range of values designated by Wget as "controls").
Neither options should be needed normally. By default, an IPv6-aware Wget will use the address family
specified by the host's DNS record. If the DNS responds with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, Wget will try
them in sequence until it finds one it can connect to. (Also see "--prefer-family" option described
below.)
These options can be used to deliberately force the use of IPv4 or IPv6 address families on dual family
systems, usually to aid debugging or to deal with broken network configuration. Only one of --inet6-only
and --inet4-only may be specified at the same time. Neither option is available in Wget compiled without
IPv6 support.
--prefer-family=none/IPv4/IPv6
When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the addresses with specified address family first.
The address order returned by DNS is used without change by default.
This avoids spurious errors and connect attempts when accessing hosts that resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4
addresses from IPv4 networks. For example, www.kame.net resolves to 2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085
and to 203.178.141.194. When the preferred family is "IPv4", the IPv4 address is used first; when the
preferred family is "IPv6", the IPv6 address is used first; if the specified value is "none", the address
order returned by DNS is used without change.
Unlike -4 and -6, this option doesn't inhibit access to any address family, it only changes the order in
which the addresses are accessed. Also note that the reordering performed by this option is stable---it
doesn't affect order of addresses of the same family. That is, the relative order of all IPv4 addresses
and of all IPv6 addresses remains intact in all cases.
--retry-connrefused
Consider "connection refused" a transient error and try again. Normally Wget gives up on a URL when it is
unable to connect to the site because failure to connect is taken as a sign that the server is not running
at all and that retries would not help. This option is for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers tend
to disappear for short periods of time.
--user=user
--password=password
Specify the username user and password password for both FTP and HTTP file retrieval. These parameters
can be overridden using the --ftp-user and --ftp-password options for FTP connections and the --http-user
and --http-password options for HTTP connections.
--ask-password
Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified when --password is being used,
because they are mutually exclusive.
--no-iri
Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use --iri to turn it on. IRI support is activated by
default.
You can set the default state of IRI support using the "iri" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be
overridden from the command line.
--local-encoding=encoding
Force Wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. That affects how Wget converts URLs specified
as arguments from locale to UTF-8 for IRI support.
Wget use the function "nl_langinfo()" and then the "CHARSET" environment variable to get the locale. If it
You can set the default encoding using the "remoteencoding" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be
overridden from the command line.
--unlink
Force Wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file. This option is useful for downloading to
the directory with hardlinks.
Directory Options
-nd
--no-directories
Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this option turned on, all
files will get saved to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the
filenames will get extensions .n).
-x
--force-directories
The opposite of -nd---create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not have been created
otherwise. E.g. wget -x http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt will save the downloaded file to
fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt.
-nH
--no-host-directories
Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget with -r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
will create a structure of directories beginning with fly.srk.fer.hr/. This option disables such
behavior.
--protocol-directories
Use the protocol name as a directory component of local file names. For example, with this option, wget
-r http://host will save to http/host/... rather than just to host/....
--cut-dirs=number
Ignore number directory components. This is useful for getting a fine-grained control over the directory
where recursive retrieval will be saved.
Take, for example, the directory at ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. If you retrieve it with -r, it will
be saved locally under ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. While the -nH option can remove the ftp.xemacs.org/
part, you are still stuck with pub/xemacs. This is where --cut-dirs comes in handy; it makes Wget not
"see" number remote directory components. Here are several examples of how --cut-dirs option works.
No options -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
-nH -> pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1 -> xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=2 -> .
--cut-dirs=1 -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
...
If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is similar to a combination of -nd and
-P. However, unlike -nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with subdirectories---for instance, with -nH
--cut-dirs=1, a beta/ subdirectory will be placed to xemacs/beta, as one would expect.
-P prefix
--directory-prefix=prefix
regexp \.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?, this option will cause the suffix .html to be appended to the local filename.
This is useful, for instance, when you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you want the
mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another good use for this is when you're
downloading CGI-generated materials. A URL like http://site.com/article.cgi?25 will be saved as
article.cgi?25.html.
Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time you re-mirror a site, because
Wget can't tell that the local X.html file corresponds to remote URL X (since it doesn't yet know that the
URL produces output of type text/html or application/xhtml+xml.
As of version 1.12, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files of type text/css end in the suffix
.css, and the option was renamed from --html-extension, to better reflect its new behavior. The old option
name is still acceptable, but should now be considered deprecated.
At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include suffixes for other types of
content, including content types that are not parsed by Wget.
--http-user=user
--http-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on an HTTP server. According to the type of the
challenge, Wget will encode them using either the "basic" (insecure), the "digest", or the Windows "NTLM"
authentication scheme.
Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either method reveals your password to
anyone who bothers to run "ps". To prevent the passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or
.netrc, and make sure to protect those files from other users with "chmod". If the passwords are really
important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit the files and delete them after Wget has
started the download.
--no-http-keep-alive
Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP downloads. Normally, Wget asks the server to keep the
connection open so that, when you download more than one document from the same server, they get
transferred over the same TCP connection. This saves time and at the same time reduces the load on the
server.
This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent (keep-alive) connections don't work for you, for
example due to a server bug or due to the inability of server-side scripts to cope with the connections.
--no-cache
Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the remote server an appropriate directive
(Pragma: no-cache) to get the file from the remote service, rather than returning the cached version.
This is especially useful for retrieving and flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers.
Caching is allowed by default.
--no-cookies
Disable the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for maintaining server-side state. The server sends
the client a cookie using the "Set-Cookie" header, and the client responds with the same cookie upon
further requests. Since cookies allow the server owners to keep track of visitors and for sites to
exchange this information, some consider them a breach of privacy. The default is to use cookies;
however, storing cookies is not on by default.
--load-cookies file
Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval. file is a textual file in the format originally
"Netscape 4.x."
The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
"Mozilla and Netscape 6.x."
Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located somewhere under ~/.mozilla, in the directory
of your profile. The full path usually ends up looking somewhat like ~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-
string/cookies.txt.
"Internet Explorer."
You can produce a cookie file Wget can use by using the File menu, Import and Export, Export Cookies.
This has been tested with Internet Explorer 5; it is not guaranteed to work with earlier versions.
"Other browsers."
If you are using a different browser to create your cookies, --load-cookies will only work if you can
locate or produce a cookie file in the Netscape format that Wget expects.
If you cannot use --load-cookies, there might still be an alternative. If your browser supports a "cookie
manager", you can use it to view the cookies used when accessing the site you're mirroring. Write down
the name and value of the cookie, and manually instruct Wget to send those cookies, bypassing the
"official" cookie support:
wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"
--save-cookies file
Save cookies to file before exiting. This will not save cookies that have expired or that have no expiry
time (so-called "session cookies"), but also see --keep-session-cookies.
--keep-session-cookies
When specified, causes --save-cookies to also save session cookies. Session cookies are normally not
saved because they are meant to be kept in memory and forgotten when you exit the browser. Saving them is
useful on sites that require you to log in or to visit the home page before you can access some pages.
With this option, multiple Wget runs are considered a single browser session as far as the site is
concerned.
Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session cookies, Wget marks them with an expiry
timestamp of 0. Wget's --load-cookies recognizes those as session cookies, but it might confuse other
browsers. Also note that cookies so loaded will be treated as other session cookies, which means that if
you want --save-cookies to preserve them again, you must use --keep-session-cookies again.
--ignore-length
Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more precise) send out bogus "Content-Length"
headers, which makes Wget go wild, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved. You can spot this
syndrome if Wget retries getting the same document again and again, each time claiming that the (otherwise
normal) connection has closed on the very same byte.
With this option, Wget will ignore the "Content-Length" header---as if it never existed.
--header=header-line
Send header-line along with the rest of the headers in each HTTP request. The supplied header is sent as-
is, which means it must contain name and value separated by colon, and must not contain newlines.
You may define more than one additional header by specifying --header more than once.
wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
--max-redirect=number
Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for a resource. The default is 20, which is
usually far more than necessary. However, on those occasions where you want to allow more (or fewer), this
is the option to use.
--proxy-user=user
--proxy-password=password
Specify the username user and password password for authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode
them using the "basic" authentication scheme.
Security considerations similar to those with --http-password pertain here as well.
--referer=url
Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for retrieving documents with server-side
processing that assume they are always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come out
properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that point to them.
--save-headers
Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the actual contents, with an empty line as
the separator.
-U agent-string
--user-agent=agent-string
Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server.
The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a "User-Agent" header field. This
enables distinguishing the WWW software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of protocol
violations. Wget normally identifies as Wget/version, version being the current version number of Wget.
However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of tailoring the output according to the
"User-Agent"-supplied information. While this is not such a bad idea in theory, it has been abused by
servers denying information to clients other than (historically) Netscape or, more frequently, Microsoft
Internet Explorer. This option allows you to change the "User-Agent" line issued by Wget. Use of this
option is discouraged, unless you really know what you are doing.
Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs Wget not to send the "User-Agent" header in
HTTP requests.
--post-data=string
--post-file=file
Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the specified data in the request body. --post-data
sends string as data, whereas --post-file sends the contents of file. Other than that, they work in
exactly the same way. In particular, they both expect content of the form "key1=value1&key2=value2", with
percent-encoding for special characters; the only difference is that one expects its content as a command-
line parameter and the other accepts its content from a file. In particular, --post-file is not for
transmitting files as form attachments: those must appear as "key=value" data (with appropriate percent-
coding) just like everything else. Wget does not currently support "multipart/form-data" for transmitting
POST data; only "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Only one of --post-data and --post-file should be
specified.
Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in advance. Therefore the argument to
"--post-file" must be a regular file; specifying a FIFO or something like /dev/stdin won't work. It's not
quite clear how to work around this limitation inherent in HTTP/1.0. Although HTTP/1.1 introduces chunked
transfer that doesn't require knowing the request length in advance, a client can't use chunked unless it
wget --save-cookies cookies.txt \
--post-data 'user=foo&password=bar' \
http://server.com/auth.php
# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
-p http://server.com/interesting/article.php
If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication, the above will not work because
--save-cookies will not save them (and neither will browsers) and the cookies.txt file will be empty. In
that case use --keep-session-cookies along with --save-cookies to force saving of session cookies.
--content-disposition
If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-functional) support for "Content-Disposition" headers is
enabled. This can currently result in extra round-trips to the server for a "HEAD" request, and is known
to suffer from a few bugs, which is why it is not currently enabled by default.
This option is useful for some file-downloading CGI programs that use "Content-Disposition" headers to
describe what the name of a downloaded file should be.
--content-on-error
If this is set to on, wget will not skip the content when the server responds with a http status code that
indicates error.
--trust-server-names
If this is set to on, on a redirect the last component of the redirection URL will be used as the local
file name. By default it is used the last component in the original URL.
--auth-no-challenge
If this option is given, Wget will send Basic HTTP authentication information (plaintext username and
password) for all requests, just like Wget 1.10.2 and prior did by default.
Use of this option is not recommended, and is intended only to support some few obscure servers, which
never send HTTP authentication challenges, but accept unsolicited auth info, say, in addition to form-
based authentication.
HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options
To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget must be compiled with an external SSL library, currently
OpenSSL. If Wget is compiled without SSL support, none of these options are available.
--secure-protocol=protocol
Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are auto, SSLv2, SSLv3, and TLSv1. If auto is used,
the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the appropriate protocol automatically, which is achieved
by sending an SSLv2 greeting and announcing support for SSLv3 and TLSv1. This is the default.
Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1 forces the use of the corresponding protocol. This is useful when
talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that make it hard for OpenSSL to choose the correct
protocol version. Fortunately, such servers are quite rare.
--no-check-certificate
Don't check the server certificate against the available certificate authorities. Also don't require the
URL host name to match the common name presented by the certificate.
As of Wget 1.10, the default is to verify the server's certificate against the recognized certificate
--certificate=file
Use the client certificate stored in file. This is needed for servers that are configured to require
certificates from the clients that connect to them. Normally a certificate is not required and this
switch is optional.
--certificate-type=type
Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values are PEM (assumed by default) and DER, also known
as ASN1.
--private-key=file
Read the private key from file. This allows you to provide the private key in a file separate from the
certificate.
--private-key-type=type
Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are PEM (the default) and DER.
--ca-certificate=file
Use file as the file with the bundle of certificate authorities ("CA") to verify the peers. The
certificates must be in PEM format.
Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL
installation time.
--ca-directory=directory
Specifies directory containing CA certificates in PEM format. Each file contains one CA certificate, and
the file name is based on a hash value derived from the certificate. This is achieved by processing a
certificate directory with the "c_rehash" utility supplied with OpenSSL. Using --ca-directory is more
efficient than --ca-certificate when many certificates are installed because it allows Wget to fetch
certificates on demand.
Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL
installation time.
--random-file=file
Use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number generator on systems without
/dev/random.
On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of randomness to initialize. Randomness may be
provided by EGD (see --egd-file below) or read from an external source specified by the user. If this
option is not specified, Wget looks for random data in $RANDFILE or, if that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd. If
none of those are available, it is likely that SSL encryption will not be usable.
If you're getting the "Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG; disabling SSL." error, you should provide random data
using some of the methods described above.
--egd-file=file
Use file as the EGD socket. EGD stands for Entropy Gathering Daemon, a user-space program that collects
data from various unpredictable system sources and makes it available to other programs that might need
it. Encryption software, such as the SSL library, needs sources of non-repeating randomness to seed the
random number generator used to produce cryptographically strong keys.
OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy using the "RAND_FILE" environment variable.
If this variable is unset, or if the specified file does not produce enough randomness, OpenSSL will read
random data from EGD socket specified using this option.
--warc-cdx
Write CDX index files.
--warc-dedup=file
Do not store records listed in this CDX file.
--no-warc-compression
Do not compress WARC files with GZIP.
--no-warc-digests
Do not calculate SHA1 digests.
--no-warc-keep-log
Do not store the log file in a WARC record.
--warc-tempdir=dir
Specify the location for temporary files created by the WARC writer.
FTP Options
--ftp-user=user
--ftp-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on an FTP server. Without this, or the corresponding
startup option, the password defaults to -wget@, normally used for anonymous FTP.
Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either method reveals your password to
anyone who bothers to run "ps". To prevent the passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or
.netrc, and make sure to protect those files from other users with "chmod". If the passwords are really
important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit the files and delete them after Wget has
started the download.
--no-remove-listing
Don't remove the temporary .listing files generated by FTP retrievals. Normally, these files contain the
raw directory listings received from FTP servers. Not removing them can be useful for debugging purposes,
or when you want to be able to easily check on the contents of remote server directories (e.g. to verify
that a mirror you're running is complete).
Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this file, this is not a security hole in the
scenario of a user making .listing a symbolic link to /etc/passwd or something and asking "root" to run
Wget in his or her directory. Depending on the options used, either Wget will refuse to write to
.listing, making the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or the symbolic link will be deleted
and replaced with the actual .listing file, or the listing will be written to a .listing.number file.
Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, "root" should never run Wget in a non-trusted user's
directory. A user could do something as simple as linking index.html to /etc/passwd and asking "root" to
run Wget with -N or -r so the file will be overwritten.
--no-glob
Turn off FTP globbing. Globbing refers to the use of shell-like special characters (wildcards), like *,
?, [ and ] to retrieve more than one file from the same directory at once, like:
wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msg
By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a globbing character. This option may be used
in some rare firewall configurations, active FTP actually works when passive FTP doesn't. If you suspect
this to be the case, use this option, or set "passive_ftp=off" in your init file.
--preserve-permissions
Preserve remote file permissions instead of permissions set by umask.
--retr-symlinks
By default, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic link is encountered, the symbolic
link is traversed and the pointed-to files are retrieved. Currently, Wget does not traverse symbolic
links to directories to download them recursively, though this feature may be added in the future.
When --retr-symlinks=no is specified, the linked-to file is not downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic
link is created on the local filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be retrieved unless this recursive
retrieval would have encountered it separately and downloaded it anyway. This option poses a security
risk where a malicious FTP Server may cause Wget to write to files outside of the intended directories
through a specially crafted .LISTING file.
Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was specified on the command-line, rather
than because it was recursed to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this
case.
Recursive Retrieval Options
-r
--recursive
Turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum depth is 5.
-l depth
--level=depth
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth.
--delete-after
This option tells Wget to delete every single file it downloads, after having done so. It is useful for
pre-fetching popular pages through a proxy, e.g.:
wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/
The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not create directories.
Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It does not issue the DELE command to remote
FTP sites, for instance. Also note that when --delete-after is specified, --convert-links is ignored, so
.orig files are simply not created in the first place.
-k
--convert-links
After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local viewing.
This affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content,
such as embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.
Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:
ยท The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be changed to refer to the file they point
to as a relative link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in
can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.
Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have been downloaded. Because of
that, the work done by -k will be performed at the end of all the downloads.
-K
--backup-converted
When converting a file, back up the original version with a .orig suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
-m
--mirror
Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite
recursion depth and keeps FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf
--no-remove-listing.
-p
--page-requisites
This option causes Wget to download all the files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML
page. This includes such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets.
Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents that may be needed to display it
properly are not downloaded. Using -r together with -l can help, but since Wget does not ordinarily
distinguish between external and inlined documents, one is generally left with "leaf documents" that are
missing their requisites.
For instance, say document 1.html contains an "<IMG>" tag referencing 1.gif and an "<A>" tag pointing to
external document 2.html. Say that 2.html is similar but that its image is 2.gif and it links to 3.html.
Say this continues up to some arbitrarily high number.
If one executes the command:
wget -r -l 2 http://<site>/1.html
then 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, 2.gif, and 3.html will be downloaded. As you can see, 3.html is without its
requisite 3.gif because Wget is simply counting the number of hops (up to 2) away from 1.html in order to
determine where to stop the recursion. However, with this command:
wget -r -l 2 -p http://<site>/1.html
all the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will be downloaded. Similarly,
wget -r -l 1 -p http://<site>/1.html
will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to be downloaded. One might think that:
wget -r -l 0 -p http://<site>/1.html
would download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately this is not the case, because -l 0 is equivalent
to -l inf---that is, infinite recursion. To download a single HTML page (or a handful of them, all
specified on the command-line or in a -i URL input file) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off
-r and -l:
wget -p http://<site>/1.html
-->.
According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML declarations. Declaration is special
markup that begins with <! and ends with >, such as <!DOCTYPE ...>, that may contain comments between a
pair of -- delimiters. HTML comments are "empty declarations", SGML declarations without any non-comment
text. Therefore, <!--foo--> is a valid comment, and so is <!--one-- --two-->, but <!--1--2--> is not.
On the other hand, most HTML writers don't perceive comments as anything other than text delimited with
<!-- and -->, which is not quite the same. For example, something like <!------------> works as a valid
comment as long as the number of dashes is a multiple of four (!). If not, the comment technically lasts
until the next --, which may be at the other end of the document. Because of this, many popular browsers
completely ignore the specification and implement what users have come to expect: comments delimited with
<!-- and -->.
Until version 1.9, Wget interpreted comments strictly, which resulted in missing links in many web pages
that displayed fine in browsers, but had the misfortune of containing non-compliant comments. Beginning
with version 1.9, Wget has joined the ranks of clients that implements "naive" comments, terminating each
comment at the first occurrence of -->.
If, for whatever reason, you want strict comment parsing, use this option to turn it on.
Recursive Accept/Reject Options
-A acclist --accept acclist
-R rejlist --reject rejlist
Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to accept or reject. Note that if any of
the wildcard characters, *, ?, [ or ], appear in an element of acclist or rejlist, it will be treated as a
pattern, rather than a suffix.
--accept-regex urlregex
--reject-regex urlregex
Specify a regular expression to accept or reject the complete URL.
--regex-type regextype
Specify the regular expression type. Possible types are posix or pcre. Note that to be able to use pcre
type, wget has to be compiled with libpcre support.
-D domain-list
--domains=domain-list
Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a comma-separated list of domains. Note that it does not turn
on -H.
--exclude-domains domain-list
Specify the domains that are not to be followed.
--follow-ftp
Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget will ignore all the FTP links.
--follow-tags=list
Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it considers when looking for linked
documents during a recursive retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be considered,
however, he or she should be specify such tags in a comma-separated list with this option.
--ignore-tags=list
This is the opposite of the --follow-tags option. To skip certain HTML tags when recursively looking for
--ignore-case
Ignore case when matching files and directories. This influences the behavior of -R, -A, -I, and -X
options, as well as globbing implemented when downloading from FTP sites. For example, with this option,
-A *.txt will match file1.txt, but also file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on.
-H
--span-hosts
Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving.
-L
--relative
Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without any distractions, not even
those from the same hosts.
-I list
--include-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading. Elements of list may
contain wildcards.
-X list
--exclude-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download. Elements of list may
contain wildcards.
-np
--no-parent
Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This is a useful option, since it
guarantees that only the files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.
ENVIRONMENT
Wget supports proxies for both HTTP and FTP retrievals. The standard way to specify proxy location, which
Wget recognizes, is using the following environment variables:
http_proxy
https_proxy
If set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables should contain the URLs of the proxies for HTTP and HTTPS
connections respectively.
ftp_proxy
This variable should contain the URL of the proxy for FTP connections. It is quite common that http_proxy
and ftp_proxy are set to the same URL.
no_proxy
This variable should contain a comma-separated list of domain extensions proxy should not be used for.
For instance, if the value of no_proxy is .mit.edu, proxy will not be used to retrieve documents from MIT.
EXIT STATUS
Wget may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems.
0 No problems occurred.
1 Generic error code.
2 Parse error---for instance, when parsing command-line options, the .wgetrc or .netrc...
With the exceptions of 0 and 1, the lower-numbered exit codes take precedence over higher-numbered ones, when
multiple types of errors are encountered.
In versions of Wget prior to 1.12, Wget's exit status tended to be unhelpful and inconsistent. Recursive
downloads would virtually always return 0 (success), regardless of any issues encountered, and non-recursive
fetches only returned the status corresponding to the most recently-attempted download.
FILES
/etc/wgetrc
Default location of the global startup file.
.wgetrc
User startup file.
BUGS
You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see
<http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker>).
Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few simple guidelines.
1. Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is a bug. If Wget crashes, it's a bug. If Wget
does not behave as documented, it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not sure about the way
they are supposed to work, it might well be a bug, but you might want to double-check the documentation
and the mailing lists.
2. Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if Wget crashes while downloading wget
-rl0 -kKE -t5 --no-proxy http://yoyodyne.com -o /tmp/log, you should try to see if the crash is
repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler set of options. You might even try to start the download at
the page where the crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered the crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of your .wgetrc file, just dumping it into
the debug message is probably a bad idea. Instead, you should first try to see if the bug repeats with
.wgetrc moved out of the way. Only if it turns out that .wgetrc settings affect the bug, mail me the
relevant parts of the file.
3. Please start Wget with -d option and send us the resulting output (or relevant parts thereof). If Wget
was compiled without debug support, recompile it---it is much easier to trace bugs with debug support on.
Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive information from the debug log before sending
it to the bug address. The "-d" won't go out of its way to collect sensitive information, but the log
will contain a fairly complete transcript of Wget's communication with the server, which may include
passwords and pieces of downloaded data. Since the bug address is publically archived, you may assume
that all bug reports are visible to the public.
4. If Wget has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g. "gdb `which wget` core" and type "where" to get the
backtrace. This may not work if the system administrator has disabled core files, but it is safe to try.
SEE ALSO
This is not the complete manual for GNU Wget. For more complete information, including more detailed
explanations of some of the options, and a number of commands available for use with .wgetrc files and the -e
option, see the GNU Info entry for wget.
AUTHOR
GNU Wget 1.14 2016-11-05 WGET(1)
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